Rwanda

I spent much of last week being driven along twisting dusty tracks in Rwanda, with some Congolese music jangling out from the radio, past fields filled with crops and occasionally banana or coffee bushes, while the scent of eucalyptus and mint hung in the air.
Kids ran out from their homes to wave, their eyes opening with surprise as they saw my reddening Irish flesh, glowing under the African sun after a long winter, and shouted ‘muzungu’ (white man). Even the adults did a double take and then nodded solemnly in greeting.
While there is a modest tourist industry to the north where gorillas can be seen along the slopes of the Virunga mountains foreign visitors are a rarity in Rwanda, particularly in the areas where I was travelling – Kamonyi district a couple of hours’ drive from the capital Kigali and in the Huye district in the south of the country close to the border with Burundi.
It is the second time I have travelled with the Irish international development agency Trócaire (I was in Nicaragua four years ago). Once again I was brought into areas and into contact with people that it would be impossible for an independent traveller to reach.
On Friday I sat in a large room with a group of 40 women in a hilltop village about 40 minutes drive from Butare in Huye district. They were part of a reconciliation project, funded by Trócaire and included women who lost their husbands and other members of their family in the 1994 genocide in which one million people died. Other women in the same group were left to fend for themselves and their families alone because their husbands were in prison for taking part in the genocide.
Euphrasie’s husband was convicted under one of the ‘Gacaca’ courts (traditionally local forums to resolve disputes between neighbours) which were set up in the wake of the genocide. His neighbour accused him of being part of a mob which used machetes to slaughter a child. Other members of the mob who confessed said Euphrasie’s husband had been with them and he was found with the child’s watch.
However, he denied taking part and said he had been at home when the attack took part. Euphrasie told the court that he had not been at home and her husband now blames her for his being in prison. He was sentenced to 19 years but his wife fears his release because under the country’s laws she will not be allowed to refuse him coming into her home.
Euphrasie sat for us to have her picture taken beside a spritely 64-year-old called Cancilda whose husband and son were both killed during the genocide. She was not sure how or when they died although she suspects that a neighbour who had been “like a father” to her son and with whom he was hiding may have betrayed him to the maurading Interahamwe (the Hutu paramilitary gang which turned on their Tutsi neighbours and moderate Hutus who failed to take part or tried to help the Tutsis or had intermarried with them).
Cancilda fled her home and made the 40km journey by foot to Burundi as the genocide gathered pace. She said she saw many people being killed and was in constant fear of her life.
She told me: “There was killing everywhere. I could see people being killed and thrown into rivers. We were drinking water mixed with blood”.
While reconciliation between women such as Cancilda and Euphrasie is inspiring and there are many other examples there are others who have refused and there is still a tangible tension bubbling under the surface.
Against this backdrop is widespread poverty with most people in rural areas depending on subsistence farming. Rwanda is the most densely populated country in Africa and the pressure on land is intense. Overproduction means that each year it is losing the soil capacity to feed 40,000 people each year while the population continues to grow.
Both male and female children share equal rights and so when they inherit their parents’ land it is divided equally among them, and with an average of three children per family this means increasingly diminishing plots for each generation.
I met several farming families who were dependent on the land they farmed to feed themselves. Crop rotation has been encouraged and terracing in their fields to improve irrigation and help prevent soil erosion but a poor crop will inevitably mean hunger.
During a visit to one family I saw a filthy child tottering aimlessly around their yard, its belly distended, eyes glazed and a layer of dried mucus along its upper lip. I thought it was a girl but couldn’t be sure.
While the family we were visiting were obviously poor their children were bright-eyed and laughing with delight as we showed them their pictures on digital cameras but this wee one plodded aimlessly about the place and stared blankly when I tried to engage it. A Trócaire worker took one look and said the child was suffering from malnutrition.
Through our translator I asked the woman of the household about the child. She said it was a boy called Dani who was about two (the child she was holding was also two and the difference in their physical health was stark). She said Dani’s father had been a senior official in the regional cooperative but had stolen money and abandoned his wife and seven children. Dani’s mother was unable to work because she had to look after her children.
We were told the child had been fed at the local health centre but it was clearly not enough. When I asked the woman if she thought Dani would live she sighed and shrugged. It was not a heartless gesture for she was clearly struggling to feed her own family, but it suggested an inevitability and there was helplessness in her face.
I saw Dani on the first day of my visit and in a vastly overpopulated country dependent on subsistence farming can only assume that it is not a unique story.
I’m still writing up my reports for a series which should run in The Irish News over the next few weeks.

Barcelona

Despite a concerted effort to track down navajas (razor clams) in Barcelona I failed. Not that this should be the basis on which to judge a city - undoubtedly they were on the menus of restaurants I walked past, it is just that I never found them.
Despite that I enjoyed some great meals there - pulpo (octopus), calamares (squid), gambas (prawns) and bacalao (Basque-style salted cod). Some good Catalan wine as well.
Barcelona is an easy city to navigate around and after three days I felt I had sussed out its lay out. La Rambla which runs from Placa Catalunya down to the city's port is as good a place as any to start. It is a great people watching stroll favoured by both tourists and residents alike.
A few steps away into one of the side streets can take you into a contemporary shopping centre or else in cobbled alleyway with Tabac shops, cafes, crumbling churches and private residences.
Closer to the harbour the streets become slightly more tacky, with sex shops and an occasional street walker lurking in a darkened alleyway. It is the territory of Almodovar's Todo Sobre Mi Madre and the novels of Manuel Vazquez Montalban (Offide being the novel of choice to accompany me on this visit).
Last week I watched Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona to put me in the mood for my visit. The film seemed to be partly funded by the Barcelona tourist board as a showcase for the city's delights. Woody had clearly been watching a few Almodovar movies before he shot this. While I'm a fan Allen's movie came across as cloying and derivative - check out the scene where the Vicky and Juan Antonio are watching the guitarist and compare it to the scene where Caetano Veloso sing Cucurrucucu Paloma in Almodovar's Hable con ella.
I also found VCB to be glaringly naive, one of the character's, Vicky goes to Barcelona and raves on about studying Catalan culture, yet she can't even speak Castellano, never mind Catalan but somehow manages to spend lots of times perusing books in libraries.
Despite its artistic pretentions it is an enjoyable movie but one in which all the main actors are totally overshadowed by the performance of Penelope Cruz.
She also starred in Todo Sobre Mi Madre, playing a nun who falls pregnant to a Aids-infected, transexual prostitute. Other characters are a single mother whose only child has been run down and a stage actress who is obsessed with her drug-addled lesbian lover. Can't see Woody tackling this somehow.
It gives only a passing nod to Barcelona's more iconic locations, a brief scene outside the Gaudi cathedral - which features regularly in VCB. Infact it could have been set anywhere as the location is superflous to its dark story of a woman coming to terms with her own grief, by reluctantly becoming a source of comfort to others.
I'm still reading Offside, the fourth Montalban novel I have in my collection, but it was interesting to find myself at the start of the week wandering down the streets where his fictional detective Pepe Carvalho had been a few hours earlier as I read the first few chapters on the plane. Review to follow.
I also picked up a new novel while I was there - La piel fría (Cold Skin - originally written in Catalan and published as La pell fida) by Albert Sánchez Piñol, a novelist from Barcelona. Its main protagonists is an Irishman (a former IRA member) who is working for a scientific expedition in the Antarctic and who ends up confronting killer aliens. There is a psychological undercurrent to this sci-fi story which at first glance I can get the gist of but which will probably take a lot of cross-referencing with my dictionary to get all its nuances. There is an English language translation, but apparently it expunges all references to the central character's Irishness.

The Lone Man by Bernardo Atxaga

Maybe it is because this novel is a translation of a translation that its prose often seems clunky and occasionally banal. It was originally written in Basque, tranaslated into Spanish and it is the Spanish translation that has in turn been translated into English.
Atxaga's narrative technique is also slightly unusual, much of it takes the form of an internal dialogue in Carlos the main protatagnist's head between himself, a nagging voice of self-doubt who he has named The Rat, his former Eta commander Sabino, and his estranged brother Kropotsly (who is in a mental institution).
It is a claustraphobic novel set mostly in and around a hotel outside Barcelona which is owned by Carlos and a number of other former Eta activists. The hotel is almost symbolic of Carlos's psyche and seems to have trapped him both physically in the same way that his past has trapped him psychologically.
It was bought from the proceeds of an armed bank raid after Carlos and the others were released from prison. They have all more or less cut themselves off from their militant past and are even critical of the direction in which Eta has gone.
However, despite this Carlos has hidden two on-the-run Eta members who police throughout Spain are searching for. Wanted posters for them are everywhere. Things are complicated because the Polish national soccer team are staying in the hotel during the 1982 World Cup and the grounds are swamped with police.
Carlos soon realises that there is more to the police presence than merely protecting the footballers and he suspects that someone has tipped them off that the fugitives are hidding somewhere in the hotel or within its grounds.
His colleagues suspect that something is going on and Carlos is forced into betraying life-long friendships and loyalties as he tries to pretend everything is normal, knowing that if the fugitives are captured his betrayal will land his friends in as much trouble with the authorities as himself.
His attempts to remain calm and act as if everything is normal while under the scrutiny of his friends and police (uniformed and undercover) the blaze of publicity surrounding the Polish squad staying in the hotel and conflicting voices in his head who keep dragging up his past all contrive to pin Carlos down further and further.
He hatches a plan to get the fugitives away from the hotel during a World Cup match between Spain and Germany and focuses all his attention in putting it in place. Atxaga prepares the final tragedy of this novel well, planting information and scenarios that only come in to play in the last few pages with a quickening pace that leads to a conclusion that seemed almost inevivtable despite earlier expectations.
The Lone Man is slightly uneven novel but one worth persevering with.

The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño

The detective theme runs loosely through this novel. The two main protagonists, Arturo Belano and Ulises Lima, search for a long-forgotten poet. The narrators, dozens of them, are like a series of witnesses recalling their memories of Belano and Lima and weaving in details of their own lives.
Roberto Bolaño does little to disguise himself as a character – as well as having an almost similar name to his creator Arturo Belano was born in Chile, grew up in Mexico before emigrating to Europe and roaming around France and Spain.
In Mexico City, Belano and Lima are the figureheads in the Visceral Realists, a fringe group of a dozen poets. It is these poets and their partners, friends, families and associates who narrate the Savage Detectives, with Belano and Lima coming in and out of view, sometimes on the merest fringes of the action only to suddenly take up centre stage again.
Before turning to fiction Bolaño was a poet and in this novel he lays bare his passion for poetry and his belief that being a poet demands a total way of being and living rather than a pastime or even an occupation.
There are pages where he simply lists the names of poets, and discussions on poetic technique and academic theory. In Ireland poets tend to be regarded as niche figures, unknown and disregarded among a handful of big names (who most people may have heard of but few will have read), but Bolaño’s young poets are rebellious, anarchic, dangerous, hard-living and full of passion.
They are contemptuous of the establishment figures (including Ocatavio Paz – Mexico’s Nobel Laureate who at one point they plan to kidnap and who even makes an appearance as a character).
However, that youthful passion becomes dissipated as the years pass and the viscerals drift apart, marry, hook up with partners, get jobs and get caught up in the cycle of modern life, working, eating watching television and stagnating. Some continue to write.
Opening in 1975 the Savage Detectives follows the lives of Arturo, and to a lesser extent Ulises, into the mid-1990s, always from the perspective of other narrators into whose lives they drift in an out. It is narrative technique that is unsettling and forces the reader to fill in gaps and make assumptions. Added to this is a chronology which jumps back and forward in time so that you can find your self reading a scene that took part decades before the one that preceded it.
There is an almost supernatural subtext to the story and Arturo and Ulises seem to be cursed. Many of the people they come into contact with suffer ill-health, madness, misfortune and death. Both end up in Europe, living in poverty and working at menial jobs, although always with the hint of continual writing going on although Arturo is the only one who eventually has work published.
The supernatural elements come to the fore in a more tangible way when a boy is falls into a disused mineshaft at a campsite in Galicia where Arturo is working as a watchman. Someone is lowered in to the pit to rescue him is hauled out screaming and says he has seen the devil. When Arturo is lowered in to attempt a second rescue he descends deep and then calls for the rope on which he is being lowered to be cut. While those outside believe that he may have fallen to his death alongside the lost boy he eventually emerges carrying the still-alive missing child.
Bolaño doesn’t overplay the supernatural and it is not a major element but, as in his later novel 2666 (reviewed here) it is there.
The Savage Detectives also calls on its readers to make their own imaginative conclusions. There is no tying up of lose ends. We last see Arturo working as a reporter in an African war-zone heading into a possible massacre, but the narrator of this chapter is unable to fund out any more information about him and there is the suggestion that he is still alive. We last see Ulises standing in a park talking to Octavio Paz but don’t get to find out what he is doing or if, like Arturo he is still writing.
The non-linear narrative and shifting perspectives can be demanding and the loose ends frustrating but then like 2666 the point of these novels seems to be the actual reading and experiencing of it rather than getting to the end to find out what happened.

Lewis, Stuart and O'Flaherty

Belfast-born CS Lewis is often cited as a "Christian apologist" but the theology that he incorporates in his 'fantasy trilogy' is distinctly unorthodox.
The first two novels – read over Christmas and arse about face (the second read first and first second) – tell of the journeys of an English university don to Mars and then to Venus.
Out of the Silent Planet (the first in the trilogy) sees Elwin Ransom kidnapped and taken to Malacandra (Mars) where he encounters three distinct intelligent species who live mostly in the deep canyons that criss-cross the surface of the planet. The outer shell of the planet is dead.
During his encounters with the various species Ransom is told that the Solar System was created by Maledil who put various deities in charge of each planet and along with numerous ethereal entitities, "eldila".
Ransom eventually gets to meet Oyarsa, the Malacandran deity, who tells him that his equivalent on Earth (Thulcandra) has become 'bent' and was sealed into Thulcandra's atmosphere following a great battle that took place long before life existed on the planet.
While Oyarsa can communicate with the deities on the other planets in the Solar System, Earth has become known as 'the silent planet'.
Christianity is not mentioned and the cosmology that threads through this novel seemed to mirror the gnostic myths of an overall deity, lesser gods (including one who believed that he was the supreme being and creator of all) and archons (Lewis's eldila).
Describing Ransom's descent from space to the surface of Malacandra, Lewis writes: "Suddenly the lights of the Universe seemed to be turned down. As if some deamon had rubbed the heaven's face with a dirty sponge, the spleandour in which they had lived for so long blenched to a pallid, cheerless and pitiable grey... what had been a chariot gliding in the fields of heaven became a dark steel box dimly lighted by a slit of window, and falling. They were falling out of the heavens, into a world. Nothing in all his adventures bit so deeply into Ransom's mind as this. He wondered how he could ever have thought of planets, even of the Earth, as islands of life and reality floating in a deadly void. Now, with a certainty which never after deserted him, he saw the planets - the 'earths' he called them in his thoughts - as mere holes or gaps in the living heaven - excluded and rejected wastes of heavy matter and murky air, formed not by addition to, but by subtraction from, the surrounding brightness. And yet, he thought, beyond the solar system the brightness ends. Is that the real void, the real death. Unless... he groped for the idea... unless visible light is also a hole or a gap, a mere diminution of something else. Something that is to bright unchanging heaven as heaven is to the dark, heavy earths...
(Out of the Silent Planet P45)
Describing the eldila he writes" "You must be looking in the right place and the right time; and that is not likely to come about unless the eldil wishes to be seen. Sometimes you can mistake them for a sunbeam or even a moving of the leaves; but when you look again you see that it was an eldil and that it is gone." (P94)
CS Lewis is hugely inventive in creating alien landscapes, lifeforms and fauna. He even gives us as basic initiation into the Malacandran language.
Both Out of the Silent Planet and its sequel Journey to Venus (also published as Perelandra) can be read as straight forward adventures, in the same way that his later more famous children's novels can.
Journey to Venus reintroduces Ransom but whereas Malacandra is an old and dying planet Venus is still young and virginal with life still emerging. Ransom finds a virtual garden of Eden, complete with the Venetian equivalent of Eve and Adam (although they are green-skinned).
Again he is superb at creating an alien landscape with islands that float on an ocean and whose landscape warps and flattens with the tides inhabited by dozens of animals, fish, trees and plants.
Weston, one of Ransom's kidnapper's from Out of The Silent Planet, is also sent to Venus (by the Earth's bent Oyarsa) to try to engineer another 'downfall' similar to the biblical one on Earth. Ransom works to stop it.
The third novel in the trilogy That Hideous Strength is in my pile to be read.
Francis Stuart's final novel (novella) also touches on spiritual themes but in a much more gnarled way. King David Dances is by no means a good novel – it is almost entirely lacking a cogent plot – but it does contain some typically Stuartian passages.
An imaginary dialogue between the narrator Lodsi Dormondi and 'The Grand Arbiter runs:
"Grand Arbiter: Tell me, apart from the care of cats and a general rapport with the animal kingdom, what have you mastered.
"Lodsi: The art of succumbing to pain, to the very brink of despair, of teetering on the edge of the pit and then regaining balance just in time. And also in the absence of actual tragedy, an imaginative skill and tendency to evoke, and dream agonies of the most subtle and haunting kind."
(King David Dances P35)
In a superbly inarticulate attempt to describe his warped spirituality Stuart writes:
"We aren't demanding, or begging for miracles or even dispensations, not for the old rewards: eternal beatitudes, reunion with lost ones. It seems to me, though I haven't yet got round to meditating on this that our first concern is the great events, experiences, that illuminate the outer chaos, revealing for a moment a harmony, taking place in obscurity, burning themselves out in an intensity of love and compassion, are preserved. That is that they should not pass and perish and that those who seek this assurance are given it, however fragile and with whatever contradicting asides, for only the pure in heart, if not in the mortal flesh, can clearly decode such signals. (P50)
Despite the appalling syntax this rings as something that is for Stuart heartfelt and struggling to said but he is not quite sure how to say it.
On the final page Stuart writes:
"Here I shall end this diary as I began: confused, emotionally and physically disturbed, filled by vast glimpses, by near visions, but finding each year and month, almost day, ever more difficult." (P61)
Liam O'Flaherty is a much more earthy writer than Stuart or Lewis and his stories are rooted in nature and human interaction.
The Black Soul tells the story of O'Connor, an Irishman wounded in the trenches while fighting for the British army during the First World War. He is an arrogant, isolated and damaged man and clearly a fictional alter-ego for O'Flaherty.
With his sanity is at breaking point and filled with disgust for the society in which he lives he flees to an island of the west coast of Ireland where the people still live an almost primitive existence, dependent on the land and sea for their survival.
O'Connor is just as contemptuous for the island peasants as he is of the urbane Dublin that he has fled but it is in this landscape that he begins to heal, both physically and mentally.
O'Flaherty's prose is raw and poetic: "Red John's cabin lay huddled against the buff of the hill. Around it the wind only sighed and moaned, for none but stray blasts reached it, blasts that had wandered from the storm, fallen in weariness from the whirling coils that rushed eastwards without pausing for breath. But the sea-spray sometimes struck the door, with a slow falling swish, as of a mountain of loose silk being crushed. The cries of the sea-birds that whirled about it sounded dismally. It was as if the lid were wrenched from the mouth of hell and the wailing of the damned came floating up from distant caverns." (The Black Soul P16).
While O'Connor is being healed his presence stirs passion and jealousy among the people he is staying among. Red John, in whose cabin he lives, becomes insane with anger as his wife Little Mary falls for O'Connor and becomes his lover.
The Black Soul is not as gritty as The Assassin or The Informer and less bleak than Skerritt. It comes the closest to the perfection of his short stories and for me it is his best piece of long fiction

Music for the solstice

Cúinne an Ghiorria by Colm Mac Con Iomaire formed an interesting sound track to this year's winter solstice. The fiddler began his musical career with Kíla and is also a member of The Frames. His solo album draws on traditional influences but with distinctly Philip Glass-type moments that often gives a contemporary classical feel.
Loops of sound gradually mutate and overlap to create a hypnotic soundscape with sometimes just the barest hint of a traditional air.
It reminded me at bit of Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh's album Where the One Eyed Man is King where he also stripped back all flourishes to create contemporary-sounding pieces that often had a mere passing nod to tradition.
Mac Con Iomaire's former band Kíla were involved in a project earlier this year with French composer Bruno Coulais which is being tipped for an Oscar.
The Secret of Kells is the soundtrack to an animated feature film. Kíla take second billing to Coulais but and the contribution is mostly as backing musicians.
The album combines elements of Irish trad with contemporary classical and monastic chanting to create an intriguing soundscape.
At times it reminded me a bit of Zbigniew Preisner score for the film Three Colours Blue and at others it was pure Kila.

Cancer Ward by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The title and subject matter are sure to put off many people from this novel and they would be right as there are quite a few grim moments in it. Despite that it is an immensely rewarding read that left me feeling quite humble.
Cancer Ward is set in a hospital in Uzbekistan in the 1950s which was a Soviet Republic at the time.
It is told from the point of view of various narrators - patients, doctors and nurses - but mainly from the perspective of Kostoglotov, a fictional version of Solzhenitsyn. Like the author Kostoglotov is a former soldier who was sent to a gulag and then on his release in to exile where he developed cancer.
The other patients in the hospital form a cross-section of society in the far-flung outreaches of the USSR. A party apparatchik (Rusanov), an idealistic young communist and various ethnicities are all laid low by various forms of cancer and thrust together in the same ward.
The novel can of course be read at a symbolic level, with the hospital seen as a microcosm the USSR and the cancer that runs through the patients a manifestation of the sickness of society. It is just after the Stalanist era and there has been a relaxation of the harsh laws that saw dissidents like Kostoglotov imprisoned and exiled.
Rusanov, carries a guilty secret that he has only ever spoken of to his wife (he is suffering from a tumor in his throat. Twenty years earlier he had denounced a man and his wife who had shared an apartment with him and his wife because of a minor domestic dispute that resulted in his neighbour being sent into exile. Rusanov feels no guilt for what he has done but is alarmed with the new liberalisation that is taking place that will allow exiles to return.
Despite his illness and the fears of death that it brings he feels little empathy for his fellow sufferers and resents sharing a ward with them.
As a party member he fared well in the Soviet Union and lived a life of privilege. In a society that is supposed to be classless he looks down on the peasants and ordinary workers around him.
Kostoglotov challenges the communism that has been allowed to develop and says that under a true communist system the woman who cleans the hospital ward would be paid the same as the doctors who treat the patients. A statement that outrages the party member Rusanov.
Solzhenitsyn prose ranges from the pure unrelenting description of cancer in its various forms and how it eats away at the limbs and organs of the body to the poetic as gets inside the deepest fears of those who have been striken by the disease. The treatment in the 1950 often entailed bombarding tumors with x-rays with little thought for the collateral damage being caused to adjoining healthy parts of the body. Surgery was also often used, cutting out piece of the body and affected limbs.
There is great sense of time and place for those who lived in the sprawling USSR at that time.
Cancer Ward is as much a history lesson (with excellent but never distracting translator's notes) that helps the reader contextualise what is happening and explain some of the more obscure references.
Solzhenitsyn is superb on how the disease totally redefines the lives of those who are suffering from it, how they move from a before (they were diagnosed) with cancer to after it. How the disease defines their lives and how what they took for granted before suddenly assumes an almost magical and precious quality, that even the banal experiences of everyday life (even for a prisoner and political exile)are suddenly worth savouring.
This is not an easy novel to read but that is not an excuse not to read it.